Cousins grapple with loss then rebuild in Alliance’s ‘Furlough’s Paradise’

Sade (Heath) and Mina (Duniani) are cousins who have both recently lost a parent — and, in turn, an aunt and an uncle. The two grew up more like siblings as kids, but their lives have diverged radically as adults.

Sade is back home on leave from a lengthy prison sentence (she still has seven years left) for what we gather was a serious crime she committed when she was very young. Heath imbues Sade with lived-in weariness and the conscious movement of someone who’s used to having no privacy at all, except by retreating to her interior thoughts. She walks cautiously, never wasting a single step without deliberation and thought.

As the play moves forward, we see her defenses begin to melt as she becomes more the version of herself that existed as a kid with her cousin and their family — back before all the permanent loss.

Credit: Photo by Greg Mooney

Credit: Photo by Greg Mooney

Meanwhile, Mina is living a life that on the surface projects a high level of aspirational success. She’s in a high-powered job at Google and commutes from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit her actor girlfriend. As the show goes on, though, we hear the many ways in which — though they’re clearly facing differing levels of power and autonomy — Mina is also constrained by the weight of expectations and the limitations of her own privilege in a deeply inequitable system.

Those who may not have experienced grief firsthand — at least the grief of losing someone core to your life and identity — may assume that it’s something that brings people together automatically. And yet, it’s something that most people experience as extremely isolating. When someone dies, you also lose the potential of how your relationship with them might have changed or improved and the hope of what you can never know.

For payne, who uses a they pronoun, that grief becomes fodder for seeing how many intersections these two seemingly disparate characters may find in this strange island of time and space. As they put it in a Q&A inside the show program: “. . . grief opens us up in a way that nothing else does. Grief lays you bare.”

In this singular space, it does become a kind of oasis of supreme vulnerability and honesty. Although Sade and Mina do talk about the idea of utopia (as the play’s title suggests), it’s in their connecting that the characters begin to construct a bridge to a reality in which they can understand one another.

Credit: Photo by Greg Mooney

Credit: Photo by Greg Mooney

It’s no easy task for Sade especially, who is living a kind of in-between existence already, and who at one point admonishes Mina, “You don’t have to talk about me like I’m in the past.” In a particularly poignant moment, Sade talks about her flawed-but-trying mother, who loved the singer Sade and listened to Sade’s music daily — but “didn’t always have time to love her daughter,” who had the same name.

Confidently and tenderly directed by Alliance Artistic Director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden, the characters remain in orbit around each other, moving kinetically across the stage, setting up the fold-out bed from the couch, making food, turning the TV on and off.

The story vividly depicts how we gravitate toward whatever makes us comfortable, whatever is most readily in front of us, in times of pain — which, in this case, manifests as bowls full of Cookie Crisp cereal, and familiar and nostalgic TV like “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and early aughts Disney Channel throwback “The Cheetah Girls.” (The latter receives a hilarious tribute later in the show.)

Meanwhile, the sound design by Christopher Lane punctuates the impermanence of whatever bond they do forge in this fraught moment. For instance, we get the ominous sound of a clock ticking down as Sade’s three-day furlough runs out.

There’s a claustrophobia and a sense of displacement hanging over everything, too — of not fully belonging or having to justify your place to those around you. That’s something Mina expresses when she guiltily admits she sold her father’s home and now only has this smaller, less lived-in space to use when she visits the site of their upbringing.

Kudos to scenic designer Chika Shimizu for crafting a setting that feels more like the artistic deconstruction of a home, with different levels presenting vignettes of the amenities you would expect, but nothing fully connected. That’s much in the way our brains adapt to new spaces piece by piece — and much in the way that our memories of home may outsize certain spaces where we congregated more.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how delightful and funny this show is, with standout moments of physical comedy and some taut and witty repartee between Sade and Mina. As the barriers between cousins break down, a sense of playfulness comes tiptoeing back in, until one glorious visual reminder of childhood innocence at the very end.

One final thought that has been marinating since I walked out of the Hertz Stage theater space. It’s less a criticism than a wish and a hope for the future of this show. This production is lovely and provocative and does contain within it notes of stage magic — hints here and there that indicate how time and memory are weaving together and impacting what we’re seeing.

But the depth of payne’s writing hints that a production could still go further with pressing into the feverish, surreal dream states of the characters, especially when they’re suspended between waking and dreaming. There are a few moments that do lean into the surreal as we unpack the unreliable narration of memory, and, personally, I would have loved more of those.

It’s the sign of a potent playwright when you’re already looking into the crystal ball of where their work may go and how it may evolve to be even weirder and wilder in its next iteration.

THEATER REVIEW

“Furlough’s Paradise”

On the Alliance Theatre’s Hertz Stage through March 3. 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 404-733-4600, www.alliancetheatre.org.

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Alexis Hauk has written and edited for numerous newspapers, alt-weeklies, trade publications and national magazines, including Time, The Atlantic, Mental Floss, Uproxx and Washingtonian. Having grown up in Decatur, Alexis returned to Atlanta in 2018 after a decade living in Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City and Los Angeles. By day, she works in health communications. By night, she enjoys covering the arts and being Batman.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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